


Lost and Found

by sunalso



Series: Luck of the Draw 2020 [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No SHIELD (Marvel), Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Scientific Conference, lost object soulmate au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23134369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunalso/pseuds/sunalso
Summary: AU. Jemma's soulmate seems to lose everything he owns, but she hardly misplaces anything. How will they find each other when the world is so big?Beta by Gort.
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Series: Luck of the Draw 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653562
Comments: 38
Kudos: 146





	Lost and Found

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gort](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gort/gifts).



“Jemma!” her da yelled from the kitchen. “Jemma, come here.”

She put down the molecular biology textbook her parents had given her that morning for her thirteenth birthday and hurried down the stairs. “What?” she asked.

The oven was on, baking her cake, but her father didn’t look happy. “What is this? You left it on the table. How many times have we asked you to keep your experiments confined to your room or the shed?” He handed her what looked like a circuit board.

Jemma frowned. “It’s not mine.”

“It was on the table. I’m certain random loonies aren’t wandering around Sheffield leaving computer parts in our kitchen. Therefore, it must be yours.”

“It’s really not.”

Jemma’s mother came to stand in the doorway. “It’s Jemma’s thirteenth birthday,” she said softly.

Jemma frowned, even as her father inhaled sharply. “Oh,” he said, handing the circuit board to her.

She peered at it, but nothing stood out, it was just green with the usual parts soldered to it. “Am I supposed to understand what you’re talking about?” she asked.

“You have a soulmate,” her mother said. “And somewhere that person is wondering how that fell out of their bag.”

The object in Jemma’s hand abruptly became so much more than a random collection of plastic and metal. She cradled it close. Soulmates weren’t that uncommon in the world. Starting when you were thirteen, anything they lost would turn up somewhere in your living space. It had to be accidently lost, you couldn’t deliberately leave a letter behind with your name and phone number on it, or even tie something loosely to your luggage, expecting it to drop off during the ride through the airport. If you were lucky, you or your soulmate would misplace something that gave you a clue to their identity. Meeting them was supposed to feel like you’d been lost and were now found.

Many people never sought the other person out, and just accepted that they’d find odds and ends on their couch for the rest of their lives.

Jemma believed that the universe wouldn’t go to so much trouble if her soulmate and she shouldn’t be together.

“I never lose anything,” she said forlornly, staring down at the object in her hands.

“If you’re meant to find each other, you will,” her father said. “I found your mother when she left her entire purse behind under a table in a pub. Hadn’t even had a nip of something, she’d just been out with friends and got so busy talking she didn’t realize what she’d done until she was home. I felt like the conquering hero when I turned up on her doorstep with it two days later.”

Jemma rolled her eyes. She’d heard this story a million times. “And you guys haven’t been apart since.”

Her parents beamed and Jemma rushed back to her room before they could do anything embarrassing, like snog in front of her.

She wondered who had lost the circuit board and if someday they’d be embarrassing their children by making heart eyes at each other in the kitchen.

#

_Five Years Later_

The alarm on Fitz’s dorm room nightstand blared. He slapped it off and felt around for the bottle of water he kept there. His fingers knocked into the half-filled bottle, making it slosh, but what he grabbed was something soft.

Blearily, he sat up and looked at what he was holding.

A sock. A pink woman’s sock with white polka-dots.

That hadn’t been there when he went to sleep. He cradled it in his palm instead of doing what he should be, which was get in a shower before rushing off to his morning appointment with his advisor.

An unexpected sock. There was only one reason a single pink sock would be on his nightstand. He had a soulmate.

Relief crashed into him. There’d been that time a teabag that wasn’t his had shown up, but he hadn’t been sure it really didn’t belong to him. This was undeniable proof. He crushed the sock to his chest, hugging it tight. Someday, he’d be the best soulmate imaginable. Fitz kept the sock with him in his pocket as he studied, went to class, ate, and laid it on the pillow beside his head as he drifted off to sleep.

Someone, somewhere in the world, was destined to be loved by him.

#

Jemma managed to pull herself away from her laptop when the scent of blueberry pancakes wafted under her door. Her roommate, Daisy, knew just how to tempt her away from the data she’d had been up half the night processing.

“Good morning!” Daisy called as Jemma stumbled into the kitchen and plunked her rear on a chair. “There’s a hat from your soulmate this morning, which is maybe only marginally better than the wrench I found on the stove.” The lost items from Daisy’s soulmate ended up on their stovetop for some reason. She had quite the collection of tools in the corner of her room, along with several auto magazines. It was pretty clear Daisy’s soulmate was a mechanic of some kind.

Jemma’s was an engineer, and prone to losing everything. She’d deduced it was a man from the three pairs of boxers she had neatly folded into a basket in her closet, along with a grey men’s NASA shirt. The fabric was worn and soft, and she bet he missed it. There were two other baskets full of computer and mechanical odds and ends, and at last count, fifty-two pens. Her soulmate went through a lot of pens. The clincher on the engineer part had been a nearly brand new upper-level electrical engineering textbook, only the first couple chapters underlined, highlighted, and with dense equations in the margins, written in a neat hand. It hadn’t contained a name or a university, but surely at some point he had to lose something that’d give her a clue.

She picked up the hat. It was a plain black knit one, with the tag ripped out. Daisy was busy with the pancakes, and after a furtive glance at her roommate, Jemma stuck her face into the hat and breathed deeply. It smelled of hair gel, spicy cologne, along with a hint of something that was probably just him. Her toes curled.

“You know that’s weird, right?” Daisy said. The plate she set down clinked on the table, but Jemma didn’t move.

“Don’t care, he smells perfect.”

#

_Four Years Later_

Late, late, he was bloody late. Fitz scrambled to prepare for his presentation at the conference. The slides were set up, his talk planned, but he’d woken up late—blasted jet lag—and had to rush to get from his New York hotel to the conference.

He sorted through his bag, tossing aside the two pairs of socks he’d bought for his soulmate during his layover. Over the years the only things she ever lost were socks. Always adorable ankle socks, except for the very memorable time a sheer black thigh-high stocking had shown up. Fitz kept his eyes out for pairs of socks he thought she’d like and had found a set in the airport with little space shuttles on them, and another one decorated with tiny apples from the hotel’s shop.

Fitz located his tie pin and clipped it in place. He smoothed a hand over his hair and tugged at the front of his suit jacket. Most likely he looked alright. Selling the idea of forensic drones was never easy, but the people who’d be at his presentation would expect him to look like a nerdy engineer. He went to grab his lanyard from his night table and froze.

A slim mobile sat there, facedown, in a black case. He patted his coat pocket, feeling the familiar weight of his own smartphone.

The one on the night table wasn’t his.

It belonged to his soulmate.

Fingers trembling, he plucked the mobile off the night table and turned it over. The clock read NY time, but it could have auto-set when it ended up here. The background picture was of cellular level nanobots. His heart rate kicked up. Could his soulmate also be a scientist? Or maybe she liked the colors?

His mobile buzzed in his pocket, and a notification popped up on the screen of his soulmate’s mobile. It was from the conference’s app.

He could barely pull air into burning lungs.

His soulmate was here, she was here. In New York. The app helpfully pushed notifications through with her schedule. His presentation was the third one listed.

His soulmate would be there.

He stuffed the socks with shuttles on them in his slacks' pocket, in case she managed to already lose half a pair and he could help her.

Fitz put her mobile in his briefcase and returned to the bathroom to redo his hair.

#

Jemma claimed a second-row seat for her third presentation of the day. She would have been in the first row, but she’d had to find a way to phone the cab company about her missing mobile. They’d radioed the cab she’d taken to the conference venue, but of course it hadn’t been in the backseat where it’d fallen out of her purse.

Somewhere her soulmate had it. If he could crack her security, then he could find her. Maybe she would ask to use someone else’s phone and text herself, but after she listened to Dr. Leopold Fitz’s presentation on the work he was doing with drones. He was out of Glasgow, and Jemma thought her own biochemical work might be applicable to what he was doing with forensics. Depending on what she thought after today, she’d email him about a possible collaboration.

Jemma tugged down her blouse and made sure her skirt hadn’t ridden up. Why did women have to wear uncomfortable things to seem professional?

Fitz seemed to be popular, judging from how the room had started to fill up. The chairs disappeared, and people squeezed themselves in to stand and watch. He must have an ego a mile wide what with drawing crowds like this.

Jemma took out a pad of notepaper and a pen, one her soulmate had lost yesterday. It was nice but generic. Didn’t he ever steal one from his dentist’s office?

One of the conference hosts introduced Dr. Fitz, and Jemma sighed. He was young, all square shoulders, twinkling eyes, and perfect scruff. No wonder the room was packed. Fitz shook the hand of the host, turning his back so that she could see how his trousers fit him. Which was nicely.

Jemma rolled her eyes.

“Hello,” he said into the mic. “Bit more of a crowd than I was expecting.”

She sighed as Dr. Fitz’s eyes swept the room like he was looking for something or someone. He probably had some perfect girlfriend with acres of legs. Jemma fought down the rising bubble of…well, that couldn’t be jealousy. She didn’t know him. It was only in the last year she’d started working with mechanical components as part of her research. Next year she’d be the one drawing a crowd at the annual conference for Biology in Technology conference.

The room’s lights dimmed, and Fitz launched into his presentation. Five minutes later, Jemma no longer cared about crowd sizes or a hypothetical model girlfriend. Her hand flew over the page as she made notes. Dr. Fitz was brilliant. Proper brilliant.

She ached to ask questions or push him to go deeper into aspects of his work that he only skimmed over. Near the end, he put up a slide listing what he was hoping to accomplish in the next six months, and Jemma knew she could be of assistance on some of the more biological points.

Bloody hell, if only she hadn’t lost her mobile, then she could exchange contact information with him right after the presentation.

He finished and asked for questions.

There were a few, mostly inane things like what he was going to call the drones, and if he thought they’d replace search and rescue dogs.

Obviously, a great deal of what he’d said had gone over this lot’s head. Jemma stood. “Dr. Fitz, I’m Dr. Jemma Simmons, could you please describe in greater detail how you sort for molecular importance with the sniffer drone?”

Dr. Fitz lit up and launched into the development of the algorithms the drone used. She asked a follow-up, about molecular size and trapping, which required an even more in-depth answer before she yielded the floor. The next question came from an MIT grad student about motor cooling, which at least made sense.

Two questions later, the host thanked Dr. Fitz for his time. The room started to buzz with conversation, but Dr. Fitz tapped the mic. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have a question before you go. Did anyone here lose their mobile this morning? It ended up on my night table.”

There were a few chuckles, but Jemma’s eyes widened as he held up a mobile with a black case. A familiar false-color image flashed as he pushed a button on it.

Soulmate.

Dr. Leopold Fitz, with his lovely face and perfect arse was her soulmate.

Slowly, Jemma pushed herself to her feet and raised a hand. “That’s mine.”

His eyes locked with hers for a heartbeat, and then he launched himself off the small stage, pushed a chair aside, and was in her arms.

#

Fitz had read about it, seen it on TV and in the movies, hundreds of times.

None of it had remotely captured the feeling of holding and being held by his soulmate. His fiercely intelligent soulmate that had made copious notes and bit her lip during his presentation every time he’d skimmed over the deeper explanations as if she’d been holding herself back from asking questions.

That she was the loveliest woman on the planet didn’t hurt things either. Though he might be a wee bit biased.

“I was planning to email you,” she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder. “Because I thought we could collaborate, I’m a biochemist.” She tilted her face up and inhaled deeply, snuffling his neck. “But I don’t suppose I need to now. You smell the same.”

He could barely think past the sheer joy of no longer wondering who lost so many socks. “Yes, collab, good…smell?”

She smelled like almonds. It must be her shampoo. He loved almonds.

Jemma pushed back a little. She had a guilty smile on her face. “You lost a hat, once, I might have sat at my kitchen table and stuck my nose in it.”

Trying to reconcile that thought, that the gorgeous woman he had his hands on had thought about him and smelled the bloody hat he left on the bus once. He pushed her hair behind her ear. “Wow,” he breathed, not sure what else to say.

“You lose a lot of stuff.” She held up a familiar-looking pen. “Which means I really don’t have to ever buy pens.”

Fitz laughed. Knowing that his inability to hang onto pens had done someone good, had done her good, cast huge swaths of his life into a different light. “Did you get a textbook?” he asked. “I’ve always wondered if I lost that or if it was stolen.”

“I’ve got it, actually I’ve kept most of what you’ve lost. Parting with any of it seemed very wrong.”

“All you ever bloody lose is socks,” he grumbled fondly. “I’ve got all those, and I’ve bought you so many pairs. Since you seem to like cute ankle socks and…” He swallowed hard because Jemma looked shocked. “Is that weird?”

She shook her head, her ponytail swinging. “I love cute socks, and the drier eats so many of them. I’ve got a whole drawer full of mismatched ones.”

“I’ve got them.” He smiled sheepishly as he pulled out the pair in his pocket. “I got these ones in the airport on my way here, and then I brought them this morning in case you have a problem with keeping them on.”

“Oh, Dr. Fitz,” she said.

“Just Fitz, I don’t much like Leopold or Leo.”

Her hands shook as she closed them over his. “They’re so much better than the plain pair I have on. I’d change them but I’m not sure I’d be able to do it right now. Not after being found.”

“Sit,” he said, because this he could do for her. And she felt found? He hadn’t known just how lost he’d been until he’d touched her. It amazed him that Jemma felt just as blown away.

Jemma did, and he knelt before her, pulling off her practical low-heeled pumps. The socks she had on were plain white, which would never do. He cupped her calf in one hand, and she inhaled sharply, the sound loud in the now-empty room. Her skin felt soft and warm, and he stroked her with his thumb as he stripped off the sock. In contrast to her conservative conference appearance, her toenails were painted hot pink.

They were the most adorable toes he’d ever seen.

He set her foot down and switched to the other, running his hand up her leg from ankle to calf. She whimpered, which made the hair on the back of his arms stand up. Fitz rather thought he could easily spend his whole life with her, working side by side and at night finding ways to coax her into making that sound over and over again. He hadn’t been so cheered by a thought since he’d chosen his college major.

After baring her foot, he rested it against his thigh. Jemma wiggled her toes and he desperately tried not to think about their proximity to other areas of his body as he ripped the bit of plastic holding the space-shuttle socks together. Gently, he helped her slide one sock on, then the other.

He kissed her knee before standing and giving Jemma a hand.

“Much better,” she said, breathless, her eyes shining. “I am supposed to go to Dr. Wells presentation next.”

“Me too.” He didn’t want to do any such thing. “But what if we skip and go have lunch? It’s better to read his abstract later. He rambles.”

Jemma snorted. “Last time I saw him speak he spent fifteen minutes talking about his brother’s llamas.”

“One time it was sheep versus alpaca wool.”

Jemma took Fitz’s hand. “I watched that online, it was a lot of sheep.”

“I bought you socks with sheep on them.”

She laughed. “Fitz, I believe you are the smartest man I’ve ever met.”

His chest puffed out. “I hope so, it’ll be the only way I can keep up with you.”

“Lunch and molecular identification?”

“There is no doubt you’re my soulmate.”

Jemma looked very pleased with herself, like he was the one who was the prize. That would take some getting used to. “Next year, what about presenting jointly?” she asked.

“We’re going to need a bigger room.”

She hugged him, and contentment seeped into his bones. He’d never again be lost, now that he’d been found.


End file.
